Optical Fibre Communication Pioneer Charles K. Kao 1966

[Voice Over:] Source: LYBIO.net
This remarkable video from the February 1966 shows Charles Kao, the pioneer of optical fiber communication working in the laboratory. It shows him experimenting with a prototype hair-thin optical fiber made of glass. He was part of the British team that first proposed that huge quantities of information might be carried over vast distances by this novel means. This was only the beginning.

The transmission loss of these early fibers was so great that many argued that Charles’s vision was doomed to failure. However, later that year Charles and George Hockham published the defining paper which revealed that none of the current imperfections were fundamental.

Here is the helium neon gas laser invented just a few years earlier, which provided a sufficiently bright light to launch into the incredibly tiny core of the single-mode fiber. The intensity of the laser light was modulated. And that information traveled along the fiber as pulses of light which were converted back to an electrical signal at the far end.

All this pioneering work was carried out at standard telecommunication laboratories at Harlow in England now recognized as the birthplace of optical fiber communication.